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EXPERIMENT 1
Experiment 1 provided a simple and preliminary
test of the hypothesis that disbelief in free will reduces
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prosocial tendencies. Participants completed a Veltenstyle procedure in which (by random assignment) one
third of them internalized statements related to disbelief
in free will, another one third internalized states related
to a belief in free will, and the remainder pondered neutral statements. Participants then reported how likely
they would be to offer help to people depicted in several
scenarios. We predicted that disbelief in free will would
lead to lower helping intentions compared to participants
in the condition that encouraged belief in free will.
The neutral condition was of more interest than many
standard control conditions. A simple prediction would
be that its effects would be intermediate between the two
manipulated belief conditions. However, if the neutral
control differed from only one of them, that pattern
would suggest that the other belief was fairly equivalent
to what people normally believe. Our general assumption was that belief in free will promotes socially desirable and harmonious behavior, and so people generally
are socialized to believe in free will. On that basis, we
expected that the induced free will condition and the
neutral control conditions would yield similar results. In
contrast, if people mostly disbelieve in free will, the control condition should differ only from the profree will
condition.
Method
Participants. Participants were 70 undergraduate
students (30 female) who participated to fulfill a course
requirement. Six participants expressed suspicion about
the purpose of the study. Their data were excluded,
leaving a total of 64 participants.
Procedure. Participants were run together in a
large university classroom. They were asked to sit so
that no two people were adjacent to one another.
After giving informed consent, participants were
given written and oral instructions for the sentencereading procedure.
The free will belief manipulation was adapted from
Vohs and Schooler (2008). Participants were given a
packet containing 15 pages, with one sentence on each
page. Participants were randomly assigned to read sentences in support of either free will or determinism or, in
the neutral control condition, sentences that had no relevance to free will or determinism. After receiving their
packets, participants were given written and recorded
audio instructions explaining that they would be
required to read the packet 1 page at a time. Participants
were told that every time they heard a tone, they should
move on to read the next page. Tones occurred once
every minute, so that it took a total of 15 min to read the
full set of sentences.
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EXPERIMENT 3
Experiment 3 tested the hypothesis that disbelief in
free will would influence aggression toward a seemingly
innocent target. Most aggression research measures
retaliation for an insult, frustration, or other angry
provocation, and aggressive behavior under those circumstances can be affected by perceived inappropriateness of the others behavior. Aggression toward an
innocent target is, however, generally perceived as totally
inappropriate. To increase the likelihood of getting any
aggression toward an innocent target, we sought (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to stimulate feelings of social
exclusion and rejection among some participants, based
on previous findings that rejected people become slightly
more aggressive toward innocent bystanders (Twenge,
Baumeister, Tice, & Stucke, 2001; see also Leary,
Kowalski, Smith, & Phillips, 2003).
Experiments 1 and 2 found that state and trait beliefs
in determinism were related to reduced helping behavior
or tendencies, but those results could be taken to show
that disbelief in free will makes people passive and lazy
rather than indicating a reduction in prosocial behavior.
The aggression measure in the current experiment provided an opportunity to rule out the influence of this
confound. Aggression is an automatic and antisocial
response (DeWall et al., 2007) that, if anything, requires
more action than being nonaggressive. The idea that the
free will manipulation makes people passive would lead
to the prediction that it would make people less aggressive. In contrast, our hypothesis was that exerting control takes energy and that disbelief in free will makes
people reluctant to expend their energy in acts of selfcontrol. On that basis, we predicted that disbelief in free
will would produce an increase in aggression.
The aggression measure was adapted from
Lieberman, Solomon, Greenberg, and McGregor (1999)
and consisted of giving a hot and spicy food stimulus to
another participant who had expressed a severe dislike
for such foods. Aggression is defined as providing aversive stimulation to someone who does not want it and
is motivated to avoid it (Baron & Richardson, 1994),
and the hot sauce procedure was explicitly designed to
satisfy those requirements. The main prediction was
that aggression would be highest among participants
who had been induced to think a series of thoughts that
emphasized a lack of free will.
Method
Participants. Participants were 56 undergraduates
(45 female) who participated to fulfill a course requirement. Seven participants expressed suspicion about the
social exclusion manipulation and/or the presence of
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GENERAL DISCUSSION
The present results support the view that belief
in free will is a valuable support for prosocial behavior,
as suggested by Vohs and Schooler (2008). Those
researchers showed that disbelief in free will made
people more willing to cheat on a test. Our findings
extend this pattern into two major categories of prosocial and antisocial behavior. Specifically, we found that
inducing people to disbelieve in free will led to an
increase in aggression and a reduction in willingness to
help. Individuals who were chronically high in disbelief
in free will were also less likely to help another person
in distress as compared to people who were dispositionally skeptical or rejecting of free will. All these results
were found to be independent of mood and emotion.
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NOTE
1. To be sure, giving more cheese would not be unambiguously
prosocial: One might provide more cheese simply to provide a bigger
vehicle for forcing more salsa on the hapless partner.
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